About • Installation • Features • Motivation • Thanks
Dorito is a modern, cross-platform, desktop-based emulator for Chip8, SuperChip, and XO-Chip games. It also provides a complete development environment for making your own retro inspired creations. Maybe for the next Octojam?!
The primary focuses for Dorito are:
-
Compatibility
- There are lots of little quirks to run Chip8 games. Dorito lets you enable and disable these quirks at will - or use the built-in compatibility profiles for the major Chip8 systems.
-
Easy Development
- Dorito provides a comprehensive, all-in-one development experience. Code using the built-in editor, create sound effects and sprites, monitor your games as they run, and more.
-
Community
- There is a large community of *Chip developers. Dorito wants to be a good citizen by providing an alternative *Chip development environment that works with the community and not replace any part of it.
Dorito currently provides binary builds for Windows and MacOS (x86 and Apple Silicon) Linux support should be there from a 'compiling the source' standpoint but work remains on packaging Dorito for Linux. Is Snap the way to go these days? Linux folks, would love some feedback here.
Dorito uses Cmake's FetchContent along with vcpkg for dependency management. Ninja is also the preferred build system. To build from source, the following recipe should be all that is needed:
$ git clone https://github.com/lesharris/dorito.git
$ cd dorito
$ git submodule update --init --recursive
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake -G Ninja ..
$ ninja
And then if you wanted to build a release for some reason you would then execute:
$ ninja package
That will create either a Zip release file, or a MacOS DMG file.
Dorito can do a lot! Here are some highlights:
Full compatibility with the pre-eminent and original modern *Chip
environment, Octo. It implements full XO-Chip support including the
newer audio and pitch opcodes.
The dev environment integrates John Earnest's Octo Assembly Language compiler (gratefully taken from the
official c-octo project) with the built-in editor. Compiler errors show exactly
where the problem is in the editor, :monitors and :breakpoints are fully supported.
Includes a complete implementation of the standard Octo sound tool for creating sound effects for your games.
Also includes a full featured sprite editor with support for 8x16 and 16x16 sprites. In both 1-bit or glorious 2-bit color!
| Dorito | Octo | |
|---|---|---|
| Full Chip8, SuperChip, and XO-Chip Support | ✔ | ✔ |
audio support |
✔ | ✔ |
pitch support |
✔ | ✔ |
| Pre-defined palettes and custom palettes | ✔ | ✔ |
| Speed settings (cycles per frame) | ✔ | ✔ |
| Automatic Per-ROM configuration saving | ✔ | |
| Run-time tracing disassembler | ✔ | ✔ |
| Official Octo Assembly Language compler | ✔ | ✔ |
| Individual Quirk setting | ✔ | ✔ |
| Compatibility Profiles | ✔ | ✔ |
| Sprite Editor | ✔ | ✔ |
| Sound Editor | ✔ | ✔ |
| Visual Internal CPU State | ✔ | ✔ |
| Audio Waveform and Buffer visualization | ✔ | |
| RAM Visualization and Editing | ✔ | |
| CPU Profiling | ✔ | |
| Octo Cartridges | ✔ | |
| Standalone Static Analysis disassembler | ✔ | |
| Multiple Font choices | ✔ | |
| Chip flavored Name | ✔ | |
| Sea creature flavored Name | ✔ |
One of the goals of Dorito is full Octo compatibility and missing features are targets for future versions. Pull requests welcome! Hop on in!
I've written numerous emulators over the years and after getting my Gameboy emulator to a place I was happy with I thought to myself, "Self, how about you write a good Chip8 emulator instead of one of your many bad ones for once?" And so Dorito was born.
Dorito really wants to be part of the discussion when it comes to the future of Chip8 emulation and development. Rather than all new features being introduced into Octo, Dorito wants to provide a 'second-source' for experimentation and implementation. Also John Earnest's work on Octo clearly speaks for itself, but personally I wanted a cross platform option that was not web-based.
Like Newton (but also very much not like Newton lol) I've stood on the shoulders of giants when creating Dorito. I would like to personally thank John Earnest for not only keeping the Chip8 light on but ensuring it remains brightly lit. I also want to thank Timendus for his work on improving the general state of Chip8 emulation with the release of his CHIP-8 test suite (which Dorito passes, thank you Timendus!) as well as his own excellent emulator Silicon8 which was a tremendous help when trying to figure out what the heck was going on with XO-Chip and audio. Lastly, a big thank you to all the folks on /r/EmuDev for all the support, community, and entertainment provided over the years. Maybe I'll stop lurking and post. Then again, maybe not.